Farm realises ambition as a party venue

A decade after the Mellors brewed their first ale in a converted barn to establish Wold Top Brewery, the family is adding another string to its bow by hosting weddings and other celebratory events.

Breaking into the events scene is an idea husband and wife team Tom and Gill Mellor have toyed with for some time.

This year, they are seizing the opportunity.

Three weddings are booked in and credit controller Anne Duerden has taken on the management of the new venture, named Muddy Souls Events, with a first wedding fair due to take place on May 6.

Mrs Mellor said everything was in place to make the leap into events, from the farm’s glorious location over 600 acres of predominantly arable farmland, offering panoramic views of the countryside, and facilities already inside farm buildings converted to accommodate the brewery.

Mrs Mellor said: “We have a lovely garden and it was a question of building on what we had, and building on the other events we hold, such as the Moonbeams folk festival. We didn’t want to open a visitor centre in the middle of nowhere and have it open all the time. Doing events is more on our terms.

“We will open the place up, so if you’re having a wedding celebration here, you’ll get the place from Friday lunchtime until lunchtime on Sunday and it can be decorated in a way more personal to the bride and groom. That’s the way it’s going. People don’t want something that’s prescriptive. It has a very relaxed feel here.”

Muddy Souls was born after a successful wedding party was staged at the farm last year for Leila Cooper, who runs the annual music festival. There are two options for staging events at Wold Top, either in a field on the approach to the farm, where there is space for huge marquees, or inside the farm buildings next to the brewery where a timber bar extends into a former grain storage shed; now a space for marquees to hold up to 220 people.

Opposite the bar, a doorway leads on to a courtyard and the farm’s gardens beyond. A section of the courtyard will soon have a tarpaulin cover extending from the entrance to the bar and off to one side, Mrs Mellor’s old potting shed has been fitted out as a kitchen space for event caterers to use.

Guests are welcome to camp, otherwise a list of nearby B&Bs and hotels can be provided.

With two new beers planned for this summer, the venture means nothing but business as usual for Wold Top Brewery which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year and continues to produce 15,000 litres of beer every week – the equivalent of 30,000 pints.

Mrs Mellor said: “Since David Hockney’s exhibition in London last year it’s been said that there are a lot more people coming on to the Wolds and hosting events just seemed to be a natural progression as a good thing to do.”

Wold Top takes national award

Staff at Wold Top Brewery will be raising a glass this week.

The micro-brewery near Hunmanby has won the SIBA national Best Green Business Award and has been shortlisted in the ‘Tomorrow’s Brand’ and ‘Innovation’ categories of the Red Ribbon Awards, the UK’s only national awards recognising family-run companies of all sizes and across all sectors, and the Chairman of East Yorkshire’s Business Award for Businesses with Under 50 Employees.